A speaker digs a pit in the garden and lies down in it, and from there the poem unfolds as a short, bleak meditation on isolation. The opening is plain and almost matter-of-fact, which makes the act feel stranger. We aren't told why the speaker does it, but the poem suggests a kind of withdrawal, perhaps from despair or exhaustion, or a wish to rehearse being buried.
Inside the hole, the speaker feels cut off from everything. Things happen "within me / and without me," as if life carries on whether or not they take part. Writing to the night brings no reply, and the sky, usually a symbol of openness, now looks "horrid" from below. The closing image, "as near to the ground / as nothing could go," leaves the speaker at the lowest possible point. The mood is quiet, numb and lonely, with a touch of dark humor in the title's pun on "whole" and "hole."